Episode [] MSP61 [] Future Matt’s Review of 2019

Want to know what happens in 2019? Future Matt looks to the past to tell us about the year to come.

These shows are dictated to and transcribed by machines, and hurriedly edited by a human. Apologies for the minor typos and grammar flaws.

Every once in a while Matt Armitage decides to take a week off and sends me on a journey through space-time to deal with his evil alter ego, Future Matt. We’ve never managed to figure out whether he exists in our own future or on an alternate path.

Matt refuses to meet him. He claims it’s because of the risk of opening a wormhole and sucking our reality into a black hole, but we think it’s because they just don’t like each other.

This time, Matt has arranged for Future Matt to give us a review of 2019, the year we’re about to have.

Stay with me as I step through the bone crunching portal to tomorrow’s world.

Sound FX

Hello Future Matt.

· Hey Jeff. It’s just Matt. Yours is the fake one. How was the trip?

It gets more painful every time I do it. Why can’t you come to me, for once?

· Where would be the fun in that?

· I added a new dicer mode to the time traveller.

· Not because it improves functionality, but because the process of tearing your atoms apart and then rebuilding them is excruciatingly painful.

· I also put in a little Easter Egg that grafts your hands and feet back on to the wrong limbs.

· They’ll go back to normal when you travel back.

I feel a bit like JarJar Binks.

· You look more like the transformed Chet in Weird Science.

· You’re a bit gooey and not so easy on the eye.

· Anyway, why are you here?

Matt said you were going to talk to me about the future?

· You mean the past?

My future?

· Well, you’re in the future, or as I like to call it, the present, so it’s your past as well now.

How come there’s never any risk of me bumping into my future self or relations and creating a black hole? Matt’s just lying isn’t he?

· We’re not sure. There might be a risk, and there might not.

· So, to be on the safe side, I’ve killed any and all of your living.

· Which is kind of a shame. You had 8 kids. And nearly 200 great grandchildren.

· Took me the best part of ten minutes to grind them all up in the matter converter.

Now that you’ve made my entire existence pointless, shall we get on with the show?

· What was It you wanted to talk to me about?

· All these requests from the past tend to stack up on each other.

Matt wanted me to speak to you about 2019 and tell us what happened.

· That’s an easy one. Where do you want me to start.

Last week we were talking about Facebook and whether or not Mark Zuckerberg would resign as CEO.

· He does eventually, but he will still hang on throughout 2019.

· It was another tumultuous year for social media companies.

· Towards the end of the year, the US Presidential cycle kicked in again and it was obvious that the systems of most of the companies weren’t up to the task of protecting users from dark money and fake news.

· Facebook stress tests reasonably well but its vetting systems for advertisers come under pressure.

· It turns out that state actors and political pressure groups went micro.

· Instead of big ad buys, AI bots systems generated thousands of micro buys with specific geo-targeting that were more difficult to identify and apprehend.

· Do you want me to tell you who wins the 2020 election?

No. We have to leave some things for next year’s show.

· Fair enough.

What happens with Brexit?

· The country crashes out with no deal.

· In the first 3 months, 20,000 people are on the edge of starvation.

· Traffic grinds to a halt across the South East as almost 15,000 lorries and transporters are gridlocked at the country’s ports.

· Scotland and Northern Ireland vote for Independence, and the UK makes mid-crisis Greece look like a walk in the park.

· Not very tech-related though…

Matt asked me to ask you. I don’t think he meant it to go in the show.

· You can tell him I’m not here to dance for his pleasure.

· I’ll carry on with social media then.

· Business as usual at Twitter.

Isn’t Matt using Twitter again?

· Yes. He’s such a hypocrite.

· Said something stupid like trying to subvert the platform from within.

· Some kitten videos he couldn’t find on Instagram more like.

· Anyway, business as usual from twitter. Until May.

· The US Govt shutdown was still limping on.

· And President Trump’s tweets became so dark and vicious that he finally started to get auto-banned for breaching community guidelines, newsworthy or not.

· It was embarrassing for Jack Dorsey at first. Trump used Twitter to attack him, which is either ironic or delicious depending on how you look at it.

· On the back of the bans, Twitter became the only big tech company whose stock was rising.

The markets remained pretty volatile throughout 2019?

· Absolutely awful. For tech companies anyway.

· Microsoft was a beacon of stability throughout 2019.

· Facebook, obviously, had a rocky year.

· While for Amazon it was transitional.

· Most watchers called it a good year for the company.

· It increased wages and improved working conditions for its workers across the world.

So profits slipped?

· For a couple of quarters. Demand was solid but costs were higher.

· In the long term changes hugely increased the consumer traffic to the company’s various sites.

· The goodwill translated into a massive sales spike and the company’s servers worldwide nearly went down under the volume on Black Friday.

Any Echo related mishaps?

· Obviously AI was still a little primitive, nothing like, I am, erm, nothing like it is today.

· Close to Halloween, Echoes were reported to say “I’m going to get you” before starting to cackle for up to 20 minutes at a time.

· Earlier, on May the 4thsome devices were reported to have said “I am not the Droid you are looking for.”

· Unlike previous incidents which had been blamed on easter eggs in the code, or questionable information sources, this was traced back to a natural language AI system on AWS.

· It seems that the Echoes were developing a voice.

What about Apple?

· I think you’ve probably already seen that major dip the companies market cap took at the end of 2018, beginning of 2019.

· Sales continued at a similar rate for the next couple of quarters.

· Demand in China continued to decline further as the economy slowed further.